In Guilty Night (8 page)

‘I don’t know.’

Janet sighed. ‘You don’t want to gossip. That’s understandable.’

‘There’s nothing to gossip about, is there? Pillars of the community, aren’t they?’

‘Has Mr Elis ever made a pass at you?’

‘No, he hasn’t.’ Mari stared at Janet, bitter humour twitching the corners of her mouth, while her cheeks flushed.

‘What’s the joke?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

Mari fidgeted. ‘I’m not gossiping, OK? Only I heard them having a row once. She was complaining about being lonely in bed, if you get my drift.’

‘And?’

‘And he was hedging and not answering, so she lost her temper. She’s got a real bitch of a temper at times.’

‘And?’

‘She was shrieking about diseases people catch in posh public schools. Took me a while to work out what she meant.’

‘I see.’ Janet leaned back in her chair, feeling the soft upholstery cradle her shoulders, staring at Mari.

‘No, you don’t,’ Mari told her. ‘Not if you’re thinking he was after Arwel.’ Her face twisted with sorrow. ‘He really loved Arwel, like his own son. Arwel didn’t understand either, until I told him. Then he realized how important he was to Mr Elis, learning to ride and going places with him.’

‘Told Arwel?’ Janet frowned. ‘What did you tell Arwel?’

‘About the boy.’

‘For God’s sake stop talking in riddles! What boy?’

‘Their son. That boy. He’s fifteen, and he’s an idiot, a vegetable. He’s locked up in a posh private home in Meirionydd, and he should’ve died years ago, only he’s too well looked after by all that money.’ She looked scathingly at Janet. ‘Didn’t you know they had a son? Don’t you coppers know anything?’

Seated at his old dining-table, prey to the creeping sense of inadequacy wrought by Elis’s riches and erudition, McKenna surveyed the faded paper upon the walls of his little parlour, the chesterfield clad in threadbare green velvet, the carpet threatening baldness where thousands of footsteps had worn pathways among leaves and scrolls and old-fashioned roses. In the small collection of CDs and albums, the chain-store hi-fi system, the books denoting no particular interest or learning, the old prints of which he had been so proud, what had he to show for his forty-four years? Lack of money had company in the heart of poverty, he realized. A dearth of spirit, a pernicious wasting of imagination, which condemned the children of Blodwel to repeating life-patterns already marked out by parents and grandparents, their existence a ricochet from crisis to crisis to disaster.

The cat lay on her back before the fire, paws draped over her fat little belly. She looked at him upside down, and he wondered idly if she saw him inverted, or if those sleepy slitted eyes saw anything at all. She yawned, turned over, and tucked her paws under her shoulders, staring at the flames. When the doorbell pealed, her ears twitched.

‘Don’t mind me calling late, do you?’ Eifion Roberts stood on the step, Michelin Man inside a padded jacket. He waved a bottle wrapped in off-licence tissue paper. ‘Brought something to warm the innards. It’s bloody freezing again. Your lot are out on the A55 by Aber.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘A whopping great truck jack-knifed over the central barrier. Lucky the road was clear, else I’d have a few to cut up in the morning.’

‘What d’you do when there’s no body to autopsy, Eifion? How d’you fill your days?’

‘Well, I might tour the hospital wards turning off intravenous drips here and there, but it’s a lot more fun putting carbon monoxide in the odd oxygen cylinder.’ The pathologist bared
his teeth. ‘What the hell d’you think I do?’ He dropped the jacket on the floor and sat on the chesterfield, bringing a sigh from the springs.

‘How much do you weigh?’ McKenna asked.

‘Don’t know and don’t care. You’re beginning to look anorexic. D’you run to glasses in this place, or must we swig from the bottle like common folk?’ He bent down to stroke the cat, running his fingers over her haunches. ‘She’s coming on a treat, isn’t she? Must be all that affection you lavish on her.’

McKenna put two tumblers on the floor, and uncapped the bottle of whiskey. ‘Owen Griffiths reckons Denise is making a scandal out of her affections, and it’ll rub off on me.’

‘Why?’ Roberts gulped his drink. ‘You’re not her keeper.’

‘I’m still her husband. Tarnished reputations and all that.’ He sighed. ‘She’s taken up with some bloke.’

‘You know, do you? Folk think you don’t, which is why they’re not knowing what to say and what not to say. Who told you?’

‘Denise.’ McKenna smiled wryly. ‘She couldn’t wait. He’s a well-heeled type from Cheshire with a boat at the marina.’

‘Let’s hope he’s giving her whatever you wouldn’t, then,’ Roberts observed caustically. ‘Married is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And I hope you don’t care. Take no notice of Griffiths and his chapel mentality. Nobody gives a toss if Denise hops in and out of every bed between here and Manchester. How’s the shoulder?’

‘Very painful, like the rest of me.’

‘What else d’you expect? Coming off that horse, you hit the deck fast. Folk only get mangled in car crashes because when the car stops, they’re still going as fast as the car when it hit whatever it hit.’ Dr Roberts drained his glass, and poured more whiskey. ‘You wouldn’t credit some of the messes I’ve had on the table before seat belts came in.’

‘Are you planning to drive yourself home?’

‘Only if I can’t sprout wings and fly like a big fat bat. Stop being an old woman! What’s new with the boy?’

‘Not much.’ McKenna lit a cigarette, and stared at the fire. ‘We can’t get near the Blodwel kids or staff. Hogg insists there’s nothing more to tell us, and Social Services insist the boy was nothing to do with them because he was on the run.’

‘Pontius Pilate spawned more offspring than he ever knew.’ Roberts chewed his lip. ‘What’s the word with the local perverts?’

‘We should credit them with more sense, because no one would risk spending ten years on Rule 43 for a bite of fresh meat.’ McKenna shivered, the drink running fiery in his belly. ‘I hoped for something from that quarter. Somebody taking the opportunity to settle a score, perhaps.’

‘They’re shit-scared, ’cos this is too close to home, and they’re sitting ducks. Any of the staff at Blodwel got form?’

‘Clean as the driven snow, according to our records. There have been complaints about Hogg in the past.’

‘What sort of complaints?’

McKenna shrugged. ‘Dewi Prys reckons he’s a brutal sod. Griffiths was told the complaints are vicious fabrications, fabricated by disgruntled ex-residents or their families.’

‘And who told him that?’

‘Guess.’ McKenna stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Our own hierarchy is as jumpy as everyone else.’

‘You could have fifty ex-kids-in-care telling you Hogg is a psychopath, but it’s no help to Arwel. Can’t you get at the staff?’

‘They don’t seem to breathe without Hogg’s permission.’

‘Ex-staff, then. Some bod with an axe to grind.’

‘And who’ll tell us where to find them?’ McKenna lit another cigarette.

‘You could get that pretty girl you’ve taken under your wing to waylay Blodwel kids on their way back from school.’

‘They don’t go out to school, and they don’t go out without staff.’

‘Arwel did, unless he got buggered with an audience.’ Draining his glass for the second time, Dr Roberts stared at the sputtering flames.

McKenna broke the lengthening silence. ‘Elis’s wife has been overheard to comment about diseases caught in public school.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Very rich, very cultured, very charming. He has a son slightly older than Arwel was. Mari said the boy’s a vegetable.’

‘Poor sod! Enough to ruin any marriage.’

‘People say a handicapped child can bring a couple closer together.’

‘People say a lot of things which aren’t true. Religion and philosophy depend on two opposing elements creating a unifying third. Elis and his wife created an idiot, so what hope have they got?’ Settling deep in the sofa cushions, the pathologist added, ‘Denise might know the low-down on Elis’s
non-public persona. She’s running with the rich crowd, and they’re as cliquey in their own way as the queer boys and faggots.’

‘Elis rather outclasses someone with a tatty boat in Port Dinorwic marina.’

‘How d’you know it’s tatty? It could be an ocean-going yacht for all you know.’ Dr Roberts stared at McKenna. ‘Elis and his ilk aren’t averse to trawling gutters for their kicks, as his goodly wife might well know.’

‘I hear she tried to get Arwel’s body released.’

‘So maybe she knows something she doesn’t want you to find out.’

‘Like what?’

‘How should I know? It’s a bastard of a case, and you won’t get far without tapping into the gossip networks, picking up the innuendo, scrutinizing anyone with access to young boys.’ Dr Roberts sighed. ‘Nothing’s changed in the history of man, and some things never will. You can’t bypass Elis, or that Hogg. How d’you rate him as a paedophile?’

‘He doesn’t look like a child abuser.’ McKenna raked his fingers through his hair. ‘Listen to me! It’s the drink talking. You can’t tell from looking.’

‘Can’t you? I’ll lend you my rare copy of Cesare Lombroso’s
Criminal
Man.
He reckoned the bad guys have distinguishable physical differences, but no one believes him these days, even though any artist could tell you the same. We prefer Freud and his excuse theories.’

McKenna smiled. ‘Despite appearances, you’ll become a criminal if you get in your car with all that whiskey sloshing round in your belly.’

‘Who’s to know except you and me?’

‘What if you hit something?’

‘And what if I don’t? I’m not the bizarre collection of subconscious impulses Freud described as a person. I’m aware of my limitations.’

‘Not all psychiatry is problematic, Eifion.’

‘I’ve yet to be convinced. If Elis was buggered in public school, and abused Arwel, the shrinks’ll argue he can’t help repeating a learned behaviour pattern, so he’s not wilfully hurting anyone.’

‘Lombroso’s theory has the same inevitability.’

‘He never overlooked choice. Child abuse is a choice, an aspect of recreational sex, as Dai Skunk could tell you. It’s
certainly not a biological imperative.’ Dr Roberts drained his glass. ‘By the way, that bleeding lesion is Kaposi’s Sarcoma, and Jack’s convinced the HIV virus is airborne. He’s too terrified to listen to sense.’

4

Morning brought simply another absence of night, and a dense obscuring fog off the sea. Looking from his window at blankness, unrelieved by even the ghost of a shape to confirm the continued existence of his world, McKenna thought of the fog as an entity, pressing against his windows for ingress to his house and his throat and his lungs, suffocating and life-stealing. Great beads of icy dew hung from the lintel above the window and dribbled like grease down the glass. He lit the gas fire, hunched on the edge of the sofa, nursing a body riotous with pain. The cat leapt up beside him, and made a ball of herself in one corner.

Doris Hogg sat on the hard bench fixed to the wall of Blodwel’s cloakroom, hunched inside her dressing-gown, feet bare and blue with cold inside the grubby carpet slippers. She shivered, watching the boy who sat on an identical bench fixed to the opposite wall, tearing his nails until blood seeped from the quick, gnawing his knuckles until the crude blue letters tattooed on the flesh turned purple. He stared at the cheap dirty trainers on his feet, waiting and listening, and heard the dog scratching at the locked door to be allowed in from the fog.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

‘You had breakfast.’ She shuffled to the door to let in the whining dog, clothing creased around her rump, a crude embroidery of varicose veins behind her knees.

‘I only had cornflakes.’

‘You’ll get something later.’

The dog sidled in with wisps of fog about its body and dew beading its hair, snuffled at her feet, then at his, and because it was Hogg’s cur, the boy wanted to kick it back out and over the hill, to repay the animal for the cruelties of the master.

She sat again, the dog slumped by her feet, their breathing
noisy, adding to the strata of smells in this room and the building, which would haunt the rest of his days, he thought, like the memorable lessons so painfully learned. Hunger groped at his innards, nausea wormed in his gut, wriggling amid undigested cornflakes and weak tea, like the vein in the woman’s foot, wriggling like a sandworm whenever she changed the locus of pressure.

‘I feel sick.’

She yawned. He heard the wrench of jaw muscles and the clicking of teeth. ‘Be sick, then. And you needn’t think they won’t come because of the fog. It’s clearing already.’

He swallowed the bile, and stared through the window. Wisps of fog wriggled in and out of the thin trees behind Blodwel, torn by a little wind. The dog yawned too, tongue curled up inside its mouth, then snatched at the end of her dressing-gown belt, pulling open the garment to reveal snagged pink nylon clinging to her navel and the rolls of flesh around belly and waist. ‘What was that you said?’ she snapped, as he muttered under his breath. She sneered. ‘You’ll get your comeuppance! You won’t be running away again in a hurry.’

‘Maybe I won’t want to.’

Her eyes glittered. ‘You’re an evil monster! It’s your fault Arwel Thomas got killed!’

‘I said I’m hungry.’

‘You can’t be hungry if you feel sick.’

‘I’ve got my rights. I want a proper breakfast.’

‘You’ve got no rights! Mr Hogg said tea and cereal, and that’s all you’re getting.’ She stared at him. ‘Count yourself lucky you got that. You don’t deserve anything!’

He raised his head. ‘I’m not evil or a monster. You are, because you do everything he says, even when you know it’s wrong.’

‘Don’t you speak to me like that!’

‘Why not? Truth hurts, does it?’

‘You deserve to be locked up!’

‘You just said I don’t deserve anything. Why don’t you make up your fucking mind?’ He watched her face. ‘What’ll your mates do with me gone and Arwel dead?’